Dave's Movie Site

This website is dedicated to my random thoughts on movies. It will contain movie reviews and random musings.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Manifesto
*** / *****

Directed
by:
Julian Rosefeldt.

Written
by:
Julian Rosefeldt.

Starring:
Cate
Blanchett (Various).

Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto is
one of those challenging movies that you have to accept on its own terms, or
not at all. I cannot say the film “works” in a traditional sense, because the
film isn’t interested in “working” in that way. It is a film in which its star –
the great Cate Blanchett – plays 13 different characters, delivering 12
different Manifesto’s from history – mostly centered on art and the artist.
Rosefeldt is a visual artist by trade, and the film started out as an art
installation, and was later edited in the form we see it now. It’s a thought provoking
mess of a film – humorous and self-important, brilliantly acted and staged, and
yet confused and messy by design. It’s an odd film to be – maybe not a good
one, but certainly not a bad one. Its one-of-a-kind whatever it is.

Casting Blanchett in these 13
different “roles” is important. I’m not sure there is another actress (maybe
Tilda Swinton) who could have pulled this off, or that you would want to see
attempt to. The word chameleon is overused a lot when discussing actors, but it’s
fitting for Blanchett, who really does disappear into her roles. She’s
perfectly suited for this role because she has always excelled at playing
characters who themselves are playing characters – characters who are in
essence putting on one face for those around her, but allowing the audience to
see something different (this is one of the reasons why she works so well with
Todd Haynes in I’m Not There, playing Bob Dylan at his most self-involved, and
in Carol, as a closeted lesbian, pretending to be a perfect 1950s housewife).

In Manifesto, Blanchett plays
everything from a houseless derelict screaming Karl Marx’s words through a
megaphone, to a prim and proper elementary school teacher “teaching” Lars von
Trier’s Dogme 95 rules to her students. In another segment, she’s a news anchor
and the “reporter on the street” she is interviewing about conceptional art. Or
she’s a drunken punk in a bar, a housewife saying prayers around a Thanksgiving
meal, a figure out of what seems like a dystopian future, a woman making
puppets, the gallery host at an expensive art gallery, a choreographer upset
with her dancers, a struggling single mother, etc. The various real life
manifestos she is delivering are devoid of context, often contradict each
other, and usually have little to nothing to do with how Rosefeldt has chosen
to stage them, or how Blanchett has chosen to deliver them.

At this point, you may well be
asking yourself what the purpose of all this is, or what it all means. Those
are perfectly reasonable question to ask, and I don’t have adequate answers to
them. I’m not going to trying to pretend that I even understand Manifesto
completely, because I don’t. If the whole thing sounds like a pretentious art
exercise, I think you’re partially right – except that I think Rosefeldt and
Blanchett know that as well. There is something incredibly pretentious about
manifestos in themselves, and the film recognizes that and pokes fun of that.

I’m not sure if
Manifesto is a good film or not – but I do know that no matter what it is, it
is by design, and is one-of-a-kind. Even if that doesn’t quite work, is that
itself worth celebrating?

It’s become a standard trick in
genre films over the years – when you run out of ideas of sequels, go back and
tell the origin story that no one needed or asked for. That way, you can at least
keep the lucrative franchise churning, for at least one more film. That’s kind
of what happened here in Annabelle: Creation – the film is a prequel to 2014’s
Annabelle, which itself was a spinoff/prequel to James Wan’s The Conjuring –
one of the best mainstream American horror films of the decade. The original
Annabelle was a middle of the road horror film – not great like The Conjuring was,
but not horrible either. And best of all for the studio – it made money. But,
there was a problem – that story took the title character – a creepy, inanimate
doll – right up to the point where the protagonists of The Conjuring, Ed and
Lorraine Warren, have the doll under lock and key – preventing it from having
further evil adventures. So even if it kind of, sort of looked like they
explained the origins of the evil in the doll in the original Annabelle, Annabelle:
Creation reveals that wasn’t quite the case, and tells the origin story of that
doll, and how that lead into Annabelle. By all reasons of logic, this movie
therefore shouldn’t work at all – and yet, it does. It is magnificently creepy
and atmospheric, and fits in well with the themes of the entire series up to
this point. It is better than the original Annabelle – even if it doesn’t reach
the level of either Conjuring film. It is, basically, as good as this movie
could reasonably be expected to be.

The film takes place in the 1950s
– and opens with what seems like a wholesome, mid-Western family – the Mullins.
The father (Anthony LaPaglia) makes dolls – and we see him making Annabelle in
the opening scene – and along with his wife (Miranda Otto) and daughter, Bee
(Samara Lee) – they seem to be the personification of the ideal 1950s nuclear
family. And then Bee gets hit by a car and dies. 12 years later (I’m just realizing
now, that in order for the time line to fit with what we know, the main action
of the film happens in 1955, which means that opening must have been 1943 – odd
that everyone seems so enamored with the Mr. Mullins doll during WWII – but no
matter), the Mullins welcome a nun – Sister Charlotte (Stephanie Sigman) and a
group of six orphan girls – ranging in age from about 10-16 – into their large
home. Mr. Mullins barely speaks, and Mrs. Mullins is even more mysterious – she
stays in her room day and night, and rings a bell when she needs anything. The
film quickly focuses in on Janice (Talitha Bateman) – a young girl stricken
with polio, and her friend Linda (Lulu Wilson). Mr. Mullins tells Janice not to
go into his daughters old room – which he keeps locked at all times. But at
night, the door becomes unlocked for some reason – and Janice cannot resist.
You can tell where things will go from here – Annabelle the doll makes a return
appearance, and soon everyone’s soul is on the line.

The film was directed by David F.
Sandberg – which shouldn’t be too surprising, since his debut horror film (last
year’s creepy and effective Lights Out) was produced by The Conjuring’s James Wan.
Like he did with Lights Out, Sandberg clearly shows skill at slowly building atmosphere
and tension, getting on the audience edge, so just a little push has them
scared (it worked like a charm in the nearly full theater I saw the film in). The
film is so well made by Sandberg in fact that it helps the film overcome many
of its problems – the chief among them is the film internal logic consistency,
which it doesn’t have it all. It almost feels like the screenwriters were
making up this logic as the film progressed – which is a no-no in horror films,
which thrive best when they stick to the rules they set out for themselves. Had
Sandberg also found a way to make the film a little shorter (it runs nearly 2
hours, but doesn’t have nearly that much plot, so it does grow repetitive) the
film would have been even better.

Annabelle: Creation should have
been terrible, so the fact that it’s a good horror film is a pleasant surprise.
It confirms the talent that was apparent in Lights Out – that Sandberg is a
classicist horror director, and I want to see him make something even better.
Something like, say, The Conjuring.

It sometimes surprises me what
movies get sequels. The original Nut Job – from 2014 – was a forgettable animated
film, about cute, talking animals that I don’t think has entered my mind since
I wrote my review of it then. It wasn’t exactly a huge hit at the time
(although when I checked Box Office Mojo, it is the highest grossing film
released by Open Road Films – ever – sadly, beating out the Liam Neeson and the
wolves film The Grey) so that probably explains it. The fact that it made less
than half what the first film did in its opening weekend is a sign no one was
really clamoring for this film. And yet, here it is, and it’s my daughter’s 6th
birthday, and she wanted to go (as did her 3 year old sister – who I must be
raising right, as this was her first 3-D movie and she complained that the “glasses
make the movie dark”, which has been my complaint for years) and so we went.
Like the first film, it is a fast paced, cheaply animated, lazily written film
that produces a chuckle or two because of its talented voice cast, and then
ends without ever really doing much of anything. It’s not a painful sit – it’s nowhere
close to as bad as The Emoji Movie for instance – but there’s not much reason
for it to exist either.

The film is the further
adventures of Surly the Squirrel (Will Arnett) and his posse of forest animals,
who when we last saw them were living large in the nut shop, where they no
longer had to work for food. In the opening of this film though, the nut shop
explodes – and these pampered animals have to head back to the park, and
scrounge for food. That would be bad enough, but even worse is that the corrupt
mayor (who, I’m sorry, reminded me of Donald Trump) is angry at the park,
because it’s the one part of town that produces no profit, and he needs to
keeping skimming off the top – he has a private Golf Club to maintain, etc. So
the mayor wants to make the park into a cheap amusement park to milk money out
of suckers. And it’s up to the animals to stop him.

The Nut Job 2, like the first
movie, makes the mistake of thinking that all you need to do to please kids
have cute talking animals, some lame jokes, and quickly paced action sequences
and they’ll be happy. My two kids were quiet during the movie, but I didn’t sense
they were all that engaged. They had fun – because they always have fun at the
movies (like I mentioned before, they enjoyed The Emoji Movie – so perhaps I
should take back that comment about how I must be raising them right).
Basically, I cannot help but think that a movie like this is little more than a
babysitter – something to throw on TV on rainy Sunday afternoon, when your kids
are bored of all the better animated film out there. In that way, it’s very
much like the first film. I doubt I’ll think of it again after I finish this
sentence.

A couple of years ago, I stopped
issuing star ratings on my movie reviews – essentially because I think they are
kind of silly, and often I get bored of questions of why this film got 3 stars,
and that one got 3 ½ stars – or that, over the course of days, weeks or months,
I change my mind, and people seem to want absolute consistency, which I cannot guarantee.
So I stopped. And yet, on Letterboxd, I continue to assign star ratings, so after
a lot of though, I’ve decided to bring it back – and this time, I’ll use the
LEtterboxd 5 star system, instead of the Roger Ebert/Leonard Maltin 4 star
system I used for years. I think five stars give a little more nuance than 4. I
will note this – don’t expect too many five star reviews (probably 2-3 per year
(for instance, last year, I gave 5 stars to OJ: Made in America, Manchester by
the Sea and Toni Erdmann – the year before, to Inside Out, Carol and Anomalisa –
and nothing so far in 2017). This extra nuance allows me to reserve 5 stars for
the best of the best. I’m going to go back and put star ratings on the 2017
films I have reviewed – but I won’t go back and further, and for the time being
on the “classic movie reviews” I won’t be doing that either. I’ll see how it
goes.

Basically the star ratings work
like this

5 Stars - Masterpiece

4.5 Stars – Great Film

4 Stars – Very Good Film

3.5 Stars – Good Film

3 Stars – Mediocre

2.5 Stars and Down – Various degrees
of Bad

Basically, I’d recommend anything
3.5 stars and up, and wouldn’t recommend 2.5 stars and down – and if it’s a
three, it’s a tossup.

Herman Koch’s The Dinner is a
pitch black, cynical satire about awful people who do awful things. It is about
affluence, and how that breeds apathy. It is told from the unreliable
point-of-view of its main character, who can see how horrible other people are,
but cannot see it in himself – even if the reader can. It is a novel about two
couples who meet at a fancy restaurant to discuss something abhorrent their
children did together, but spend most of the time doing everything except
discussing it. The film version – it’s actually the third, as one was made in
Koch’s native Netherlands, and another made in Italy (both unseen by me) – was written
and directed by Oren Moverman, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out if
Moverman didn’t understand the source material (which I find hard to believe –
it isn’t overly complicated) – or else he got so wrapped up in trying to
overcome the inherent staginess in the premise as well as straining to add some
sort of historical resonance to the situation – that he lost sight of what the
film was actually about. In short, I know what Koch’s novel was about – but I
have no idea what Moverman’s film is about.

The film is about Paul Lohman
(Steve Coogan) and his wife Claire (Laura Linney), who are going out to meet
his brother, Stan (Richard Gere) and his wife Katelyn (Rebecca Hall). Paul and
Claire’s son, Michael (Charlie Plummer) alongside Stan’s son from a previous
marriage, Rick (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) did something terrible to a homeless
woman sleeping in an ATM vestibule – and a video of them doing it has been
posted online. No one knows that it was the boys who did it – yet – but this is
not a secret it seems this family can keep (there is already blackmail going
on, and other things, inside this family). If and when the truth is discovered,
it could, of course, end with their children going to jail – and could cost
Stan his rising political career as well. The film cuts back and forth in time –
in deliberately jarring fashion – not just to their kids and that night, but
also mainly to Paul’s past, which is marked by mental illness, and a few
instances of violence of his own.

I’m not quite sure where it was
along the way that Moverman lost sight of what the movie was about – but it was
clearly somewhere in the writing process. The film has been transplanted from
the Netherlands to America, which necessitated some changes to be sure – but the
changes Moverman makes are odd to say the least. Paul was once a history
teacher – and was working on a book about Gettysburg – and we get a long (long)
flashback to him and Stan visiting the Gettysburg site as Paul was trying to
recover from one of his breakdowns. Whatever Moverman is trying to say here,
about America’s violent past, and its effect on the action in the present of
this movie is lost on me (there is no real correlation between Gettysburg and
affluenza, which is what the movie is about, that I can see). Moverman also
makes the rather odd choice to make Hall’s Katelyn Stan’s second wife – we see
his first, Barbara (Chloe Sevigny) in all the flashbacks – a detail that wasn’t
in Koch’s book. I’m not sure what this accomplishes, rather than just adding
another character to the narratives – and since it pretty much takes the film
nearly 100 minutes of its 120 minute runtime to give Hall anything of interest
to do or say, it really doesn’t work.

At the very least, The Dinner
should work as an actors showcase if nothing else – but unfortunately, that doesn’t
work very well either. Coogan is miscast as Paul – it is a very heavy role, and
while Coogan is a talented actor, he doesn’t do well here. His American accent doesn’t
sound convincing, and the narrative requires so many personality changes for
his character, that its rather jarring (this is an instance of things working
better in the novel than the movie – because in the novel, it’s his
point-of-view, and we can tell that the way he sees himself, isn’t the way he
really is – in the movie, it all looks the same, so he comes across as wildly
inconsistent). Gere fares a little better as Stan – but I’m not quite sure that
either he or the movie realize how awful a character he really is – he almost
comes across as the good guy in the narrative – or at least the only one trying
to do the right thing, but doesn’t make it clear how selfish his motivations
actually are. The movie also skimps on the details of their children – Michael just
coming across as a whiny brat, and Rick not getting almost any screen time (and
the film, which follows the book’s example, and has Stan have another son – an adopted
one, who is black, does nothing with that character, and fails to show the
racism of everyone else in the movie. Yes, in the book, that adopted son is
also a prop – Koch’s novel was hardly perfect – but the character at least had
a purpose.

Really, the only ones who escape
unscathed in the film are Laura Linney as Claire, and Michael Chernus as the
waiter, who is remarkable at keeping things flowing through the awkward dinner.
Linney is, of course, one of the best actresses working today, and she always
finds a way to show that – which she does here as well, even if her character
is not that unsimilar to her one in Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River (in that
film, she only gets the one scene to show her true colors – which are more
prevalent here).

The movie pulls its punches right
to the end – it’s an abrupt ending, that doesn’t really offer anything
resembling resolution, but also cuts out some of the worse things the adult
character do in Koch’s novel. When the author saw the film at this year’s
Berlin film festival, he didn’t go to the after party, because he hated the
movie – and saw it as overly “moralizing”. I think Koch was being generous – in
reality, the film is just a mess. It doesn’t know what its saying or what it’s
about – and wastes a talented cast. Moverman is good filmmaker – this is his
fourth film, and his other three are all excellent – but here, he clearly missed
the mark.

There are times in which, by pure
happenstance, the timing of something works out just about perfectly – and releasing
the montage documentary the bomb on Netflix for everyone to see on August 1 –
and having the leaders of North Korea and Donald Trump trade threats of nuclear
annulation the following week is one of them. The film was originally made has
essentially a 360 degree art installation, in which viewers were to be surrounded
by screens, showing the same images, and listening to the hypnotic score by The
Acid, and seeing the history of nuclear weapons play out in front of their
eyes, with no words, until close to the end. The makers of the film said one of
the reasons why they made it is because no one talks about nuclear weapons
anymore – even if there are more than enough to kill us all many times over.
Well, they’re talking now – and a film like the bomb, even in the much
diminished form of watching it on Netflix instead of how it was made to be
watched is still hypnotic and frightening.

The film runs just under an hour,
and is basically a long montage of images about the how the bomb was created,
tested, and used – the images start out almost triumphant, and the music echoes
this – as of course, this is a magnificent scientific achievement, even if it’s
a horrifying one as well. The makers get there as well, showing us clips of old
educational films about the bomb, and how to protect your family and what to do
in the event of a nuclear strike – which, of course, was pretty much all lies.
We get images of the tests as they happen, as they blow apart houses and other structures.
We get images of the two times these bombs were actually used in war – in Hiroshima
and Nagasaki – and the tremendous cost of those. Through it all, we hear no
words, just the music by The Acid, which finds the right notes as it moves
along.

The film, which seems to be one
of mounting hopelessness and despair, doesn’t actually end as bleak as you may
it expect it will. The only time the filmmakers allow words to come into the
film, they pick a few snippets of speeches by two US Presidents – Reagan and
Obama – both of whom hoping for a nuclear weapon free future. It was a TV film –
The Day After – which helped Reagan reach this conclusion, so who the hell
knows if the bomb could help anyone else do the same – but it cannot hurt.

The film is a stunning
achievement in editing and music – a ride that is both terrifying, and, oddly
enjoyable. There isn’t a ton to say about the film, and I really do wish I had
been able to experience like those at film festivals in 2016 were able to. Yet,
even playing on Netflix, the film is stunning and unforgettable.

In the film of Robert Bresson,
suffering is often only alleviated by death. His is not a happy filmography, as
his title characters – in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) or Mouchette (1967) have
lives of suffering and pain, that is only relieved by death – for Balthazar,
when he is finally allowed to stop working and being tormented so he can lie in
a field and die, and for Mouchette, finally stopping the abuse through suicide.
By the time he made his penultimate film, The Devil Probably, in 1977, he had
to have known people were onto his tricks, and I think he’s poking fun at them
in the film. His final film – L’Argent (1983) messes with you more because of
what you know about Bresson’s previous films – which makes where that one ends
up even more devastating. But between all these masterpieces, there is this
film which I found to be insufferable. Perhaps I was supposed to though – we
cannot possibly be meant to like or sympathize with Charles, the main character
in this film are we? Next time someone tells you millennials are spoiled and
entitled brats, and it’s different in this generation than in previous ones,
show them this film. Charles has them all beat by a mile.

Charles, played by Antoine
Monnier, you see is a pure soul. He’s brilliant, but depressed. He sees through
all the phoniness around him see – the emptiness of political engagement, of philosophy,
or psychology, etc. He’s not crazy, he tells a psychologist near the end of the
film – he just sees things too clearly. Throughout much of the film, I wondered
just how seriously we were supposed to take Charles – does he actually believe
the idiocy that comes out of his mouth, or is it all just a line (if it was a
line, it was working – he has two beautiful young women fighting over who gets
to save him through sex). But no, it appears, it is no line – Charles believes
it. The question is, does Bresson?

I don’t think he does – while
Bresson recognizes how Charles believes his own bullshit, and how those around
him mistake that for depth, he also mocks them for it. There earnest readings
as the show footage of environmental destruction, and people clubbing baby
seals is certainly meant as mockery, isn’t it?

Ultimately, I do think that Bresson
is trying to have it both ways in The Devil, Probably – trying to show just how
seriously Charles –and the other youths in the movie – take themselves, and
especially how Charles takes his “suffering”, while at the same time, mocks
them for not really understanding the world around them. As he showed in Au
Hasard Balthazar, Mouchette and L’Argent, the world can be a brutal, unfeeling,
cold, cruel world. But the protagonists of those movies had much more to
complain about that Charles, who sadly will never grow old to realize what an
idiot he was as a teenager like the rest of us have to. I find much of
Bresson’s work to be profound and moving – but not this one, which is more
annoying than anything else.

About Me

I am an accountant, living in Brantford, ON - and although I am married and have beautiful daughter, I still find time to watch a lot of movies. This blog is mostly reviews of new movies - with other musing thrown in as well.